Lots of travel this week.  During the time I was away in Ontario working with labour educators from a number of Canadian unions I heard a great line from a Canadian Auto Workers educator that sustains him when he is challenged while doing good work: “You don’t always have to like th emembers, but you have to love them.”

I was reflecting on that line this week after I hosted an Open Space on Bowen Island, in my home community to provide a space for my neighbours to discuss a proposal to turn some of Bowen’s Crown Lands into a National Park.  The proposal has received a mixed reception among islanders, but there has been some outright hostility as well.  This week, a guy I consider a “howyadoin’?” friend, lambasted me for running a meeting that appeared to be “a ruse to appease the public.” I informed him that I was hosting the meeting all on my own, without anyone paying me to do so that a variety of views could be heard.  His response was still negative, but in the end, like my friend in the Auto Workers, I had to conclude you don’t have to like your fellow islanders, but you have to love them.

And God love them.

A lovely little passage from a book I am reading at the moment, that describes the allure of living with shadow.  We are captivated by fog.

I fell to dwelling upon the romance of the fog. And romantic it certainly was–the fog, like the grey shadow of infinite mystery, brooding over the whirling speck of earth; and men, mere motes of light and sparkle, cursed with an insane relish for work, riding their steeds of wood and steel through the heart of the mystery, groping their way blindly through the Unseen, and clamouring and clanging in confident speech the while their hearts are heavy with incertitude and fear.

— Jack London, The Sea-Wolf